The thorn drew blood before I saw the flowers.
“Open it from the top,” the delivery man had said, handing me the long rectangular box.
I slit the tape and reached in. A sharp sting bloomed along my finger.
Inside were two dozen red roses.
I don’t like roses.
I have never trusted things that require you to bleed to hold them.
I once thought I would miss women. I thought I would miss the small things, a partner knowing my preferred lip gloss or the kind of fuzzy socks I liked.
Instead, I married a woman who didn’t know those things.
Now, I’m married to a man.
“Do you know what my favorite flower is?” I asked Joshua one morning.
“Lily of the Valley,” he said without hesitation. “And you like snapdragons. And those orange columbines that look like creamsicles.”
“You don’t like roses,” he added.
“I don’t find beauty in things that can hurt you,” I said.
He didn’t look up from his crossword when he answered my next question.
“Forest green,” he said. “That’s your favorite color.”
It startled me how easily he knew.
I had grown used to defending my preferences.
In his remembering, I felt solid.
***
Years earlier, I came home from teaching to find hors d’oeuvres waiting.
“Peanut butter with endive, fig, and bacon,” my wife said, pressing one into my mouth before I could say hello.
I chewed. I hated peanut butter.
It wasn’t that she forgot. She believed I could be persuaded out of myself.
“It’s not like you’re allergic,” she said. “Just try it.”
It wasn’t the taste. It was the way my preference became negotiable.
I swallowed it with wine.
I wasn’t swallowing peanut butter.
Each small dismissal left a thin film of resentment I couldn’t quite name.
It was easier to drink than to argue.
Later that night, she showed me a new purple chair.
I went to sit in it.
“No,” she said. “It’s not a sitting chair. It’s a looking chair.”
I stood back up.
I had learned to stand where I was placed.
The chair was purple and untouched, angled just so. Decorative. Not meant for sitting.
***
The doorbell rang.
A delivery man butchered my last name. Joshua corrected him calmly.
Inside the box were two dozen bright red roses.
The same thorn caught me again.
“Ouch,” I said.
Joshua took the flowers from me.
“If they knew you,” he said carefully, “they’d know you don’t like roses.”
“Because of the thorns,” we said together.
He arranged them in a vase anyway.
I didn’t realize how tired I was until I wasn’t.
Now, when he says, “You don’t like roses,”
he isn’t trying to convince me otherwise.
He simply remembers.
And in that remembering, I no longer feel negotiable.
Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a Colorado-based writer and composer whose work explores identity, memory, embodiment, and subculture. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Divergents, Open Secrets, Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine, The Genre Society, Backsliders, Larina’s Lit Lounge & Chicago City Press